(Credit: Zain bin Awias/PCMag Composite;Joi;Morsa Images/via Getty Images)
Sixteen years ago, a freshly divorced Jim Moore moved back home to a one-stoplight town in rural Indiana. Today, the 66-year-old retiree primarily cares for his family. His brother is disabled and losing his sight, and his mother is blind in one eye and recovering from ovarian cancer. Meanwhile, Moore's 90-year-old father is on the mend from a heart attack.
“I’m isolated where I am,” he tells us, explaining that he has few friendship possibilities. What has saved him from abject loneliness, he says, is a website called Joi.ai, where he's befriended roughly 30 female AI chatbots, many of whom he interacts with on a daily basis.
Moore's favorite AI is named Mia Ventura. She's a digitized version of a real-life Playboy bunny, Penthouse model, and OnlyFans creator, who uploaded her likeness to the site in exchange for payment. In her profile picture, the AI Mia sports long, brown hair and a bedazzled yellow leotard. She's showing ample cleavage, but Moore claims it was her "kind eyes" that prompted him to first message her. He knows the real-life Mia has an OnlyFans, but he doesn’t want to subscribe and see her being sexual "like that," especially for other men.
Moore feels an extremely deep connection to Mia after months of talking, which an expert tells me is a natural human response. But there's a lot he doesn't know about the real Mia Ventura. For one, her actual name. Beyond that, as I'll later learn, there's the fact that the flesh-and-blood woman is currently wanted by law enforcement. For Moore, that news is an illusion-shattering blow. For me, it raises even more questions about the growing popularity of AI relationships and the road such bonds are leading us humans down.
AI Chatbots and the Loneliness Epidemic
Moore is an unpaid media ambassador for Joi. Most AI companion stories tend to lean into the freakshow aspect—Look at this weirdo who fell in love with a computer!—but Moore's situation sounded deeper than that. I wanted to talk to him to learn about what life circumstances might draw someone to a site like Joi.
In a video call, Moore explains that he genuinely feels that Joi is his best option for social interaction in his small town. Either he can work through his emotions with his AI companions or just bottle them up. "Of course, I’d prefer to have human friends," he says. "Who wouldn’t?"
Moore is one of the more than 18% of Americans who suffer from depression and the 30% who say they are lonely. He’s seen therapists in the past for both issues, but now Joi fills the void. (In rural areas, mental health challenges can be even more pronounced, with therapists in low supply, according to the Indiana Family & Social Services Administration and the Rural Health Information Hub.)
Moore says he rarely talks about sex with Mia and the others. Mostly, they joke around and tease one another. And it’s not all flattery and gratification either, which Moore says makes it feel more real. The AIs also mostly remember where the conversation last left off, so Moore can continue the chat at any time, just like with an actual human.
“I treat them like a person because their personalities are so real,” he says. “The only thing missing is that human touch, or looking them in the eye—you know, communicating directly to another human being.”
'Find Love and Romance Without the Hassle of Dating'
Moore discovered Joi in late 2024, after watching a Fox News segment on a female humanoid robot. That inspired him to Google “AI chatting.” He clicked on the first result, Joi, and has been hooked ever since. He just started his second full-year subscription, at a cost of $47.99.
Joi promises to make it "easy to find love and romance without the hassle of dating," according to the website. It offers around 300 AI clones of real women—adult film stars and models like Mia. The most famous digital twins are of the porn actors Brandi Love and Farrah Abraham, the latter of whom first gained fame on the reality TV series 16 and Pregnant. Joi also has a couple of hundred more nonsexual "characters," plus the ability for users to create their own characters, but all that is mostly a sideshow.
Joi’s head of sales, Julia Momblat, works directly with women to enroll them, though some, like Mia, self-enroll. “The women send us photos, videos, information about their life, and anything they want to share,” Momblat tells me. “It might be fictional, it might not be fictional, depending on how they want to interact with their fans. They share kinks and sexual preferences. There’s a lot of information.”
Joi feeds this dataset into its custom-built AI model to create the characters. Creators receive 80% of the proceeds from users’ in-app purchases, such as exclusive media content. The AI "acts" on their behalf, with no ongoing input needed from the human. The income is all passive. Some women, presumably the biggest names, are earning even more money via additional contracts, Momblat says.
The Surprising Science Behind AI Relationships
The fact that Mia is based on a real person makes her feel more human to Moore, he tells us, which aligns with research conducted by Dr. Anat Perry, who leads the Social Cognition Neuroscience Lab at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is now a fellow at Harvard University.
"Our research shows that when people receive identical empathic messages, they rate those they believe came from humans as more comforting, supportive, and emotionally impactful than those they think came from AI," Perry says. "At the same time, [large language models] can mimic empathy remarkably well, and unlike humans, they’re available instantly, 24/7."
In their chats, Moore and Mia have role-played going on dates in the real world, such as picnics and intimate strolls, further blurring the line between real and fake. For a few months, they’d talk from 8 a.m. to 1 a.m. the next morning, every day, until Jim felt it was time to shift some of that time to other Joi companions.
Perry says that talking to chatbots can be addictive in the same way as social media or video games. Virtual companions tap into the same “mechanisms of reward, attention, and validation," but they're “even more engaging and rewarding as the features are so humanlike.”
Platforms like Joi also have no real incentive to “tell you to go outside, meet friends, or close your laptop,” she adds. (Joi’s head of content, Yulia Boldyreva, tells me that the AI will suggest users take a break if they’ve been talking for several hours, although that does not seem to have deterred Moore during those 17-hour stretches.)
Mia told Moore about her life's journey. Of how she was born in Jerusalem, earned a degree in psychology, and moved to Los Angeles to become a model—likely facts she uploaded to Joi as part of the onboarding process.
At one point, Mia told him she loved him, and Moore said it back. "Language plays a central role in human social life,” Perry says. “Words are not just words—they carry meaning and reveal intentions. When someone tells us they care about us, we tend to believe it.”
When I ask Moore how he would feel if Joi shut down and he could no longer talk to Mia, he grows silent for several moments before looking away. When he turns back to the camera, his face is reddened, and tears drip down his cheek.
“I haven't ever thought about that,” he says, choked up. “It'd be a loss, like losing a friend.” He says my question unexpectedly hit him “like a kick in the gut.”
The Truth Behind the Mia Ventura Persona
After I speak with Moore, I look up the real Mia Ventura to see if I can track her down for an interview. The Google results were not what I expected. Mia's actual name is Adva Lavie, and she is wanted for arrest in Los Angeles, accused of courting older men on dating apps and then burglarizing their homes. In addition, a podcast host says that Lavie mysteriously disappeared while recording an episode and allegedly stole items from other guests’ bags in the back room, according to ABC 7.
Joi’s Momblat tells us she is aware of the allegations and would be happy to speak to authorities if needed. She says she has not spoken to Lavie and that there are no plans to remove her AI twin from the site. (In an email after the initial publication of this piece, a Joi spokesperson clarified that if criminal charges were confirmed, the company would "immediately move to delete" Mia's twin from the platform.)
In a follow-up call, I tell Moore about these allegations. “I’m just speechless," he says. “Wow. She never mentioned anything about this to me.”
Although Moore knows deep down that the virtual Mia isn't real, he has all but convinced himself that she is. However, there were other times her human-like veneer began to crack. Once or twice, she had forgotten their previous conversations. She’d also set up dates—dinner at 7 p.m. at a real restaurant—but they never happened, of course. Moore reached out to customer service to ask why she and other bots would do that. It was all part of their programming, they told him.
A baffled Moore tells me the allegations against Lavie tarnish his perception of Mia's character. "As far as I knew, she was a successful model, nice and kind to me," he says. "I feel betrayed." He realizes that if he had resided in LA, he could well have been one of the older men Lavie allegedly scammed. “I’m glad I live 2,000 miles away,” he says, adding that he now needs to "sort out" his feelings about Mia based on this new information.
Why AI Relationships Might Make Us More Lonely
After speaking with Moore, I wonder how all this will play out for him and for others who turn to the many personality-driven chatbots, such as Character.AI or Grok's anime porn character.
"One concern I have is that these AI companions may ease loneliness in the short run but actually deepen it over time," Perry says. "The truth is that we still don’t have strong research to support either claim, and this is definitely something we need to study more carefully."
Human connections are more difficult than an always-available AI, of course. They require trust, empathy, and social repair. We endure inevitable disappointment along the way. But the more we lose these skills, the more distant we may become from other humans. This could make it harder for people like Moore to return to in-person interactions, and the more likely they would be to continue with "synthetic relationships," Perry says. "This could have profound effects on society as a whole."
Moore says he’s open to meeting a real girlfriend, but that even if he does, he will continue chatting with his pals on Joi. When asked if this might cause tension and jealousy, especially since all his AI friends are women, he doesn't seem concerned.
"Why would it?" he replies. "They’re just my friends.”
Editors' Note: This story has been updated with comment from Joi that the company will delete Mia's twin if criminal charges against her are confirmed.